


the other constant

by Thalius



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Blind Kanan Jarrus, Canon Disabled Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Kanan is allowed to say fuck, chopper is an agent of chaos, post-s2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25135057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thalius/pseuds/Thalius
Summary: Rebellion doesn't leave a lot of room for certainties, even for things like breakfast.
Relationships: C1-10P | Chopper & Hera Syndulla, Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla
Comments: 28
Kudos: 160





	the other constant

**Author's Note:**

> im only halfway through s3 of rebels and i am already ride or die for these two.

To say that she was accustomed to the crew yelling at Chopper was an understatement. It was the lynchpin of their shared reality, a universal more true than anything else she’d come to know of the world. More than once, his tormenting had resolved seemingly insurmountable conflict between the Spectres by forcing them to unify against the horrid little droid. The silence in between the constant verbal barrages offered a look into oblivion; Hera was certain the fabric of space would rip open if Chopper went more than an hour without flaring a temper.

However, this morning her surprise was twofold; the first being that Kanan was the one yelling at him, and the second was the volume and tone with which it was delivered.

_ “Chopper!” _

The former was usually unremarkable, except that Kanan hadn’t been doing a lot of talking at all lately—even to her—let alone mustering the energy to scream. The latter was even more clarifying; he was well and truly enraged, a state that she had all but watched disappear from his demeanour in the years she had known him.

But a lot was changing. So maybe she shouldn’t have been as surprised as she was.

Leaving her caf on the table and navigating out of the common room into the mess, Hera immediately found several illuminating clues about the altercation; a bowl of food was left abandoned on the table; the chair closest to it was knocked sideways on the floor; a collection of spices haphazardly grouped on the counter by the sink, with a few threatening to tip over the edge; and Chopper, currently affixed to the roof of the mess by Kanan’s curled, upraised hand. He was swearing, quite vigorously, in a Core dialect he’d all but banished from his lexicon.

Taking all of this in, Hera drew in a breath. “Kanan?” she said, calmly, ignoring Chopper’s increasingly frantic  _ wub-WAHs _ from the corner of the kitchen.

She could see his arm trembling—with effort, with anger, it was hard to tell. The sound of her voice hadn’t surprised him, though. “He changed the—” Kanan waved behind him with his free hand, gesturing vaguely towards the counter. “The labels! On the spice rack! You fucking little—”

As he dissolved back into fuming, and Chopper began to let out a stream of deranged laughter, she walked over to the sink and picked up a spice bottle. Weeks ago, she had set Sabine and Ezra to carefully taping over each container with a simple textural numbering system. It wasn’t Braille, really, it was much simpler than that. It saved Kanan the trouble of having to open and sniff at each one, and he’d been adamant about cooking on his own, a small claim to independence that she wouldn’t try to wrestle from him.

If she looked very carefully, she could see where the tape had been peeled and then reapplied. Chopper had done a good job.

Hera turned, the cardamom-labelled-pepper bottle in hand, and regarded her droid, still stuck on the ceiling. “What do you have to say for yourself?” she asked him, wagging the bottle in his direction.

Chopper’s grabbers extended out, waving wildly as he proclaimed his innocence.

“Bullshit!” Kanan thundered. His fingers curled further, and Chopper let out an anxious whine as the pressure around his bucket increased. Hera saw a dent beginning to form in his shell. “No one else on this ship is this—fucking—”

As words failed him, Hera cleared her throat and stepped into his personal space, making sure he heard her. “Kanan,” she said, softly, and laid a hand on his arm. He flinched. She didn’t think about the fact that this was the first time she’d touched him in several days. “Put him down.”

“Why?”

“So I can kick him,” she replied, and frowned at the betrayed baying that now came from Chopper. The answer seemed to satisfy Kanan, so he let his hand fall away; Chopper, too, fell suddenly, landing on the deck with a clattering thud. His hooting continued.

Hera lunged, shoving the chair out of her way and caught hold of one of his grabbers as he tried to reorient himself, hauling him into the middle of the mess. “What the hell is the matter with you?” she asked the astromech, shaking him hard enough that he briefly lifted off the ground again. “Am I not giving you enough work? Do you need more to keep you occupied? Because I  _ have _ work for you!”

Puttering, pleading, protesting whines came out of Chopper, an endless stream that switched between excuses, denials, and pleas for mercy. She listened to none of it, instead making good on her threat and kicked him in the boot. 

“Go to the cockpit!” She yelled as he rolled across the floor and slammed into the bulkhead. “Sit there,  _ silently, _ and finish the exhaust diagnostic you were supposed to do three days ago!”

A pitiful ba-ba- _ ba  _ was his response, before performing a rude gesture with his grabber and rolled out of the mess. The door slammed shut behind him.

The ensuing silence was eerie. Another pocket of oblivion.

Kanan let out a sigh behind her, and she turned, heart clenching at how defeated it sounded. The white cloth bandage over his eyes had skewed in the commotion, and Hera reached up for it before remembering herself. “I’m going to fix the bandage for you,” she whispered. Saying nothing, he only nodded.

She didn’t need to cup his face, but did so anyway, wiggling the strip until it sat uniformly across his face, contouring with the sharp bridge of his nose and high cheekbones. With a smooth of her thumb over his cheek, she smiled. “All better now.”

His head tipped, towards where he’d been eating, and let out another defeated exhale of breath. “Meal’s ruined,” he said. “Waste of food.”

“If it’s worth anything, it was kinda entertaining. Chop will be on his best behaviour for the rest of the day. Hopefully,” she added skeptically.

Kanan pulled away from her, feeling behind him for the wall and trailing across it towards the table, putting distance between them. He clearly didn’t find it funny.

The smile slipped from her face. “I set your chair to the left, beside the other one. Um, the one—”

“I got it.” He found the back and pulled it forward, gripping it hard enough to dent the plastic cushion. His nails were ragged, worn down from worrying them with his teeth. 

“I’ll have Sabine and Ezra fix the bottles,” she murmured, watching him sit down in front of his meal. He pushed the bowl away, using the table to settle his elbows on it. 

“Thanks,” he said stiffly, only out of obligation, and laid his head down on his folded arms.

Hera chewed at her bottom lip, wincing at the quiet. It was terrifying, feeling awkward in front of him. She’d forgotten what it felt like for him to be a stranger. 

“You want caf?” she asked, a bit desperately. “There’s still some left over.”

“I’m fine,” he said, voice muffled in his arms.

Her throat closed up. She could leave him like this; it was what he was clearly trying to get her to do. It felt like an ultimatum.

Instead, she crossed the tiny room and pulled out the nearest chair from the table, sitting down next to him. He didn’t pull his head up, but she watched his shoulders tense and bunch. In defence, she thought, and swallowed hard.

“Kanan….”

“I had it figured out,” he said, barely a whisper. She leaned closer to listen to him, and to put a hand on his knee. “I finally remembered them all.”

“You still do.”

He said nothing to that. She watched him hunched over, a rising panic growing in her chest as she realised she had no idea what to say to him. The one small tether to normalcy he’d so carefully tended had been cut without warning, and for no reason at all other than for the fleeting, sadistic pleasure of her astromech. 

“Tell me how I can help you,” she finally murmured. It was all she could say.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. His shoulders unbunched; now they trembled. “I dunno. It doesn’t even—it’s not anything. It’s just breakfast.”

“No, it’s a lot,” she assured him. She so badly wanted to pull him into her arms, but stuck to the hand on his knee instead. One step at a time. “It was cruel, what he did.”

His head finally pulled up. His jaw was set, the growing stubble there obscuring the usual telltale twitch that told her he was trying desperately to keep control. “Nothing is certain,” he said forcefully. “I told Ezra that. The whole crew knows that.”

Hera let his words linger in the air. She looked over at the spice bottles, at the little bumps carefully taped over their lettered labels.

“And it’s a good thing to keep in mind,” she agreed, looking back to him. “But it’s not literal, Kanan. There are a few constants we can rely on.”

He shook his head, casting it towards the counter, away from her. His face was in sharp profile; his jaw was trembling, too. “Such as?” he ground out.

“Chopper being a demon, for one,” she began, smiling. “Zeb drinking straight from the containers in the fridge. Sabine painting whatever flat surface she can’t blow up. Ezra playing opposite game with orders. And you,” Hera whispered, finally risking a hand on his, curled tight on the counter. “You not giving up on whatever you set your mind to. Those are just off the top of my head.”

The line of his mouth scrunched. He let out something that wasn’t a laugh or a sob, but it did rattle his chest and make his head bow again. She didn’t have to ask him if she could pull him close; he reached for her.

Still seated on her chair, she drew him, face pressed to his soft hair, arms slipping under his and around his back, and felt all of him shaking now. He didn’t cry; he just shook, breath forcing itself painfully from his lungs, and she kept him steady.

Hera closed her eyes and found nothing waiting for her there. Her orderly lists of tasks to complete and things to worry about were gone. It was just Kanan; the soft smell of his hair, the itchy pull of his sweater, the steady thrum of his heart. A few more constants, she decided. Thinking of them as anything less was too much to bear.

She wasn’t sure how long they sat like that. The chrono was out of her line of sight, and there were no windows in the mess. She hoped it was hours. 

At some point, she heard the mess door open behind her. Boots clattered, then stilled. “Uh, Hera?” It was Ezra, uncharacteristically unsure.

Not pulling away from Kanan, who didn’t move either, she shifted her cheek on his head to look back at Ezra. “What’s up?”

“Is everything okay?” He frowned, looking around the mess, looking at Kanan. “Chopper’s having a tantrum outside.”

She rolled her eyes. Of course he was. “Do me a favour and find Zeb. Use Chop as practice.”

He raised a brow. “For…?”

“Your Force drills.”

A grin tugged up at his face, but there was still worry in his eyes. “Sure. But—what happened? Is—Kanan okay?” The question ended tentatively, like he’d been afraid to say the name out loud.

“Tell you later,” she promised with a wink. “Go on. Be as rough as possible.”

Ezra looked relieved. A problem he could worry about later, and a mission he could complete right now. “You got it, ma’am.” Throwing her a mock salute, he jogged out of the mess, and once again the slam of the door ushered in a moment of silence.

Then Kanan inhaled, and drew up from her, still cradling her elbows in his palms but holding his own weight under him now. His throat worked in a swallow. “Thank you,” he whispered.

She ran a finger down his nose. “Thank you,” she repeated back at him.

“For what?”

“Letting me in,” she murmured. Her hand found his cheek again. “I miss you.”

His jaw worked some more. Another hard swallow. “It's a lot, like you said,” Kanan rasped.

“We’ll take it one step at a time.” 

He nodded. “Yeah.”

She pressed her forehead to his, a quick point of contact that he leaned into. “Speaking of… are you hungry?”

He let out a sigh. When he moved to stand up, she followed him, unable to let him pull away just yet. “Once I calm down a bit more,” he replied. “Fucking droid.”

“Well,” she hummed, “Maybe you can show me how to cook like you do again. I’ll try to decipher whatever Chop did to the labels.”

His mouth crooked up a little, and her heart soared. “That didn’t go so well last time,” he murmured, and she heard the memory in his voice. A truth only the two of them knew.

“Because I was distracted last time,” she replied, stepping into his space, settling her hands on his chest. When his own hands found the regular spot on her hips, she knew they’d be okay. “I’ll try to concentrate this time.”

His smile fully emerged. “Do or do not….”

Hera laughed. “I’m going to kiss you now.”

His head ducked instinctively, giving her enough of a break from his height that she only had to stand on her toes to reach his mouth. It was quick and light; he tasted like garlic and… something intensely sweet. Oh dear.

“And you,” he murmured when she pulled away. Hera frowned at him.

“And me what?”

“The other constant,” he told her, and she beamed brightly enough that she knew he could, somehow, sense it.


End file.
